ichwan_mil

Being a huge fan of RE series, I have played most of them (with the exception of Survivor titles). This year RE fans are in for a threat: two RE titles out in the same year. Unfortunately, the first one, Operation Raccoon City, is truly awful - I don't even think that it deserves a place in RE franchise. It left me skeptical as to whether the second one, announced in mid 2012 not long after the release of RE:ORC, would suffer the same fate.

Fortunately not. RE6 would somehow make up for the disgrace of its older brother.

The biggest surprise in RE6 is that you've got to play four different scenarios - one is unlocked after you finish the first three - with multiple different characters. While multiple scenarios and characters is nothing new to the RE universe, previously it was never taken too deep. Past ones (like RE2 with its famous zapping system) felt almost nothing more than same scenarios only slightly altered for multiple characters. With RE6, Capcom has taken nice steps ahead. Those stories are inter-connect each other - similar to RE4, but not just 2 stories, it's 4 this time - you'll get the idea when, for instance, meeting Leon while playing as Chris, meeting Jake as Chris, and so on. This results in a nice mixture wrapped up in an amazing big story as a whole. Seriously, not many games offer this.

However, RE fans who fell in love with the series after playing the survival horror genre-defining RE1 might be very disappointed. True to form, RE has since left its survival horror roots in its subsequent iterations, but it's RE6 who takes the biggest defect. If you compare it with RE1, the comparison couldn't be bigger: there's no 'challenging' puzzle solving and scattered eerie personal diaries which RE is famous for (Puzzle solving is present here but in much simpler ways).RE6 gameplay is strictly linear - all you have to do is follow the designated path - pretty straightforward, you see. Besides, it has the intense fast-paced gameplay, i.e. most parts of the game consist of running and shooting. I guess it is something Capcom might never think when they created the original RE back in 1996..Needless to say, the legendary box-item placement is nowhere near, replaced with a simpler item-management tablet (not as many things to pick though, besides medicines, magazines, and weapons) Sure, the game has its own scary points, like abominable monsters and creepy creatures which are still omnipresent in this game, not just zombies. But considering how far this game has departed from its survival-horror root by dropping many elements of it, I prefer to call this is an action game rather than a survival horror title.

Above it all, though the genre is misleading, I found the RE6 is quite decent. Its usage of multiple characters in multiple paths through the great story lines for each delivers well, like having 4 games in one title. Fans of shooters should love it. If you are a RE fan, this is worth trying as well, though maybe you have to pretend that this is not a RE title..

Before I see this movie, I noticed something peculiar about TDKR: it is the only Batman movie without the hero's name in the title. Initially, I thought it was nothing to do with the story and stuff..one could never guess the miracle comes out of Christopher Nolan's mind, regardless of the literal packaging whatsoever.

Alas, I am wrong. Intentionally or not, the exclusion of word Batman in his own final showdown is not without a reason: It is because Batman only appears once or twice from the start to finish – get this, Batman is a guest star in his own (or more precisely, supposed to be his) movie. You can say TDKR is a movie about Bruce Wayne, Bane, underground prison, or even neutron disaster – but certainly it IS not a movie about Batman – I mean, could you count how many times Batman appears throughout the movie?

Though the 'idea' is actually cool – the aging and helpless Bruce Wayne struggling to rise in his days of doom – in fact, when I watch this movie, I got a kinda feeling of deja vu – been there, done that. I watched almost all Batman flicks ever released, but in my opinion, TDKR is the only one when I saw that the 'story did not get the feeling'. You'll see scenes of twisted emotions, despair, and pain to the point you will forget that you are not watching a Twilight franchise, instead you're watching a Batman movie! A super hero movie with touches of melodramatic scenes is no taboo at all – but I don't know, I just got the impression that the story fails to match the whole Batman feeling. To make the 'feeling' even worse, this move runs in an astonishingly 165 minutes –for the duration one expects to see tons of heroic actions. Unfortunately, it did not happen.If you're longing for the intense actions a la The Avengers, you'll most likely be disappointed. I don't know if it is because of the 'idea' of the uniqueness telling of aging Batman in this movie, but prepare to suffer for boring and long dialogues between action scenes. Even the opening scene do not serve us instant action. Forget instant brawl between Batman and Mister Freeze in the opening scene of Batman and Robin or Two Face in Forever...This one? Well, speaking of this, speaking of this...blah blah...

There are two more people who will get disappointed by this movie. First: the one who expect jokes. As we all know, Batman is identical with psychopathic characters and hilarious quotes, so some sincere laughs are understandable. Remember Bane as a somehow clumsy character in Batman and Robin? Not gonna happen again this time, Bane is taken too seriously, and everything else too. I can't remember the last film I watch in theater that I barely heard anyone laugh between scenes like when I was watching TDKR. The second? OF course the gadget freaks. We also know that Batman is famous for his sophisticated and unique gadgets, batarang, batclaw, batcomputer, etc. Yes, if you think what I'm thinking, this film has virtually nothing of those. Yes, there are batmotorcycle and batplane of some sorts, but forget Batman zips from tower to tower, or even flaps his wings. No acrobatics this time!

One more little example: just look at the Gotham City landscapes portrayed in the this movie, and you'll realize how different it takes from other past flicks – it is now a boring and tasteless one, for a fantasy city - or had Christopher Nolan forgotten that this is a fantasy setting? I really missed that glamorous lighting and unique landmarks that appeared in Keaton, Kilmer, and Clooney's Gotham City versions.

I'd rather spend five more hours re-playing Batman Arkham City in my Xbox 360 than spend more five more minutes re-watching The Dark Knight Rises in any theater.

Of all Sci-Fi shows on TV, I've found only two proving to be fresh, most engaging, and innovative...the first one is Quantum Leap that I reviewed just before, and the second one being Sliders.

Sliders has made a refreshing concept of 'alternative-reality' world - it did not join the already-crowded time-travel ship, instead it decided to set sail with its own, dubbed "dimensional travel". The creators must think that inter-dimensional travel should not be less engaging than time travel - "Same time, same earth, different dimension", as it is spoken in the opening credit.

They were right. I was among the ones who found it to be very engaging, brilliant and could not miss any single episode.

The premise is clearly explained in the Pilot, which, in my opinion - ironically, turns out to be the best episode throughout the whole series. A group of four with different motives - Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown, and Maximilian Arturo - slide into a vortex which enables them to do inter-dimensional travel. The point is, they could not control into which dimension they will land next and they often end up being stranded in unexpected situations in earths they have no idea at all - a world where Russia rules America, another one where men are inferior to women, or one world where USA is still a British colony - the quartet slide from one dimension to another as I eagerly watched...

Until the time came when they met their demise one by one; starting from Arturo who was shot, then Wade who was abducted by their archnemesis The Kromaggs, then Quinn followed when he was lost in the vortex - leaving Rembrandt alone. Well, actually he was not alone, there were others eventually came join him. Actually, the disappearance of a show's original protagonists is not something taboo - many shows actually do that without much sacrificing the quality of the show itself. What made this worse was, their demise is evoked by some dark motives behind the screen. Word has it that the actors who played the eventually-lost characters; O'Connell, Lloyd, and Rhys-Davies, were actually fired from the show or withdrew because of..well, say, conflicts of interest. Things only got even worse, when Tracy Torme, the show's mastermind, also withdrew and left the show's fate into a bunch of workers who -sadly- lacked ideas how to maintain an already-brilliant show.

For the aforementioned reasons, my interest had decreased dramatically. The last season in which I watched every episode was Season 3, only a few of Season 4 that I watched, and I did not watch any of Season 5 (when all original casts but Rembrandt Brown had lost) at all.

Rembrandt, while he was one of the starting lineups and stayed until the very end, was not enough. I don't by all means want to say that the replacement actors (Kari Wuhrer, Tembi Locke, Charlie O'Connell, and Robert Floyd) were bad - they've tried after all. Some episodes from the last two seasons actually had quite intriguing and potential plots, say "World Killer", "Genesis", and "Requiem" . But I think it's fair to say, that Sliders show has lost its spirit without Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo.

The worst of all is, of course, the very last episode, "The Seer". The episode itself is not that bad, but it provides a very terrible conclusion for the show. I realize, it was initially intended to be continued with the next season. But - again, thanks to those conflicts of interest - it didn't. And so, the real victim is the viewers like me who was left clueless, like it all has totally gone into the thin air.

Many viewers had drawn inevitable comparisons between The Sliders and Quantum Leap. The most glaring one is that Maggie Beckett, one of the replacement slider is a nephew of Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett (very interesting indeed, though never officially confirmed that I know of). Both provide refreshing approaches to Sci-Fi show world and deal with uncontrollable travel and "the endless hope of getting home" though none has managed to get home until the end. But Sliders' fate is much worse than that of Quantum Leap. In Quantum Leap, Sam and Al still stayed until the very end. While I also hate Quantum Leap's cliffhanger ending, it was not contaminated by the so-called conflicts of interest, and at least it did not lost its spirit throughout the show. Needless to say, all episodes in Quantum Leap's last season are as good as those in the first season.

To sum it up, although it has been more than 10 years since The Sliders were gone, I still wish that I might see them again in the future. But let's clear it out, to me, NEVER change the starting lineups. There is some hope, for it's the good of inter-dimensional travel show - while one character dies, the same character in another dimension may be still alive.

Bring Quinn Mallory, Rembrandt Brown, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo back to the show - I want nobody else - and get rid of those stupid conflicts of interest. I have been waiting for too long.